Sunday, February 3, 2008

LOOK Cycles advertisement

The advertisement that caught my eye is an ad placed in the February/March issue of Bicycling magazine. In the ad a professional cyclist named Thor Hushovd is dressed in a nice looking suit and is walking down a sidewalk in front of some shop windows with a black panther next to him, thats right, a black panther. In one of the shop windows is a LOOK carbon fiber road bike frame in front of a gold back drop and illuminated with golden lights. With the only text in the add reading "Unique bikes for unique people." I noticed this particular ad not only because of the ridiculous content, like the black panther on city streets, but also because of how different it is from the other ads in Bicycling magazine. Most of the ads portray a man on a bike with large muscles, a five o'clock shadow, and teeth gritted with determination. This ad just seemed so much more refined than the others that it stood out. This aspect of refinement is clearly what the ad is seeking portray thier bike frames as. Whereas many companies advertise their bikes as durable and tough, LOOK is attempting to access maybe a wealthier crowd with this ad by demonstrating the exclusive nature of LOOK bicycle ownership. This can be observed in many different points of the ad. The bike is in a shop window which greatly resembles a jewelry store set up, gold lights and gold background, and as many of us have observed jewelry shops normally put their most exquisite and expensive products in these storefron displays to entice the customer into entering their store. The fact that the professional cyclist in the ad is wearing a nice blue pinstripe suit in the picture rather than his stnadard spandex and chamois jersey also gives the consumer this sense of refinement, rather than the gritty toughness normally portrayed in cycling ads. The most noticeable aspect of the ad is probably the panther next to Thor on the street, clearly a wild black panther has no place wandering around the retail district of a large city, but nonetheless one is walking on the sidewalk. This seems to represent the exoticness of the bike and suggests that it is not as commonplace as some of the other bike brands out there. Lastly, there is the text of the ad, "Unique bikes for unique people." This is perhaps a perfect summation of the whole ad in that the company is advocating for the refined, exclusive, exotic, and ultimately unique experience of owning a LOOK bike frame and that if you own one, you too are refined like Thor Hushovd, exclusive like the jewelry in store fronts, exotic like the wild panther, and unique like the bike frame.